Binary Bonsai

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

1. The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩


2. Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

A little while back, I asked for screencasting solutions. Well, fret no more; Screencast solves everything. Definitely the best solution out there that I’ve seen. And it captures in full resolution with no problems, whatsoever.

If you bought an Apple product — say a MacBook Pro — during October, before the launch of Leopard, you’re entitled to the $10-upgrade to Leopard (nick-named ‘up-to-date’), you could be fooled into thinking that with the $2000 purchase receipt in hand, you could walk into an Apple Store, say in New York, pay them the $10 and walk away with Leopard. Right?

It certainly sounds fair to me. The stores are official Apple stores, there should be nothing stopping them from extending the offer to walk-in customers. And you might’ve put down two grand just a couple of days prior to the launch of Leopard, so really, they owe you…

That however, is not the case. For what I can only deem to be entirely artificial reasons, the up-to-date program is an online offer only! And that’s despite the fact that the $10 upgrade package is exactly the same as the retail package.

I’m guessing the reasoning lies in the $120 difference between the upgrade and the retail price. That is, there are people, like me, who are so eager to get Leopard, that they might actually pay full price for a product they otherwise are entitled to for a measly $10.

I don’t want to think that about Apple, but I’m just really really disappointed right now, that I didn’t get to take Leopard home with me.

Update: Received my ‘upgrade’ DVD of Leopard today. Yup. ‘Upgrade’. So I can’t reinstall the machine with Leopard without going through Tiger. That’s cheap Apple. Cheap. And it wasn’t boxed either, in that cool psychedelic scifi Leopard box. Oh, and it’s a double layer DVD too.

Guess what I’m torrentin’ right now…

If you know of some neat screencasting software, let me know. Windows or OS X; either is fine.

So I’m watching the keynote from yesterday, and I thought I’d throw some quick not-too-analytical thoughts into the fray now that I’m stuck here for another 40 minutes anyway.

First off, the new desktop looks nice. I have a folder named ‘clutter’ where I drag all the ‘wow, I’d love to keep that, but I have no use for it’-stuff. Basically the same as the new download folder, except that it’s a nicer implementation. Other than that, transparency and reflection is all great and all, but since I always have my dock hidden anyway, it will be incidental.

Stacks look great, and for people who don’t use Quicksilver (you know, your mom…), I’m sure it’ll be a nice way to launch apps as well. I hope you can use the scroll-wheel to flip through the stacks…

The new Finder. Was it everything you hoped for? For as long as I’ve been a Mac user, people have been whining about the Finder, and I really don’t understand why; it’s always been working great for me. The changes look nice, though it will be interesting to see just how useful Coverflow really is in a file-management environment.

Surely though, stuff like the built-in quickview is one of those things that gets the least ‘press’, but which will see the most usage.

Accessing your computers via .Mac sounds like a great feature, too bad .Mac has largely fallen behind the curve. I let my subscription expire last year, and I haven’t missed it one day.

Spaces… I’m still absolutely non-plussed. Maybe Apple’s implementation will be more intuitive to the way I work, but I’m very much an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ kinda guy, and I’ll soon forget that I have more desktops than the one I’m working on. And when a new mail rolls in, I’ll just open a browser and go to Gmail, even if I have a Gmail window open somewhere in the background already.

Safari for Windows? Well done. Am I going to use it? Probably not. I’m way too stuck in Firefox and the many extensions that make my life a hell of a lot easier. In fact, I can’t imagine the web without Google Sync, Adblock, GreaseMonkey (for my beloved Gmail scripts!) and of course the unconquerable Firebug (without which I couldn’t write Javascript).

Plus, even though the new Safari is great in many ways with stuff like resizable textareas, inline searching and reorderable tabs, plus form widgets are now skinnable… Not sure that’s a good thing… Mr. Hicks has some more observations.

But what’s it for? Well, I think Mr. Gruber probably gets it right.

But again, without the extensibility of Firefox, even though I like the rendering on Safari better, it just isn’t as interesting as it could be.

Finally, while not everyone is enthused and content about being able to do ‘web applications’ for the iPhone, I’m actually looking forward to it, as it’s something I might be able to do myself… But touting it as a proper alternative to actual app development? Not so much.

Either way, the keynote is coming to and end, and I need to get to work.

Most impressive demonstration of the keynote was probably the Core Animation video-wall, which I hope will make its way onto the net (and support misc codecs to boot).

Now, ask me: “Michael, do you want an Airport with a drive on it for Time Machine? Would that be nice?”

So yeah, no big splashes, I’m just still looking forward to the iPhone and Leopard.